On my 44th birthday, I went out for tacos for lunch, stopped by a conservatory and admired some plants and a giant koi, had chili dogs (one of my favorite things in the world to eat) for dinner, and then had ice cream sundaes with a homemade peanut butter chocolate sauce for my celebratory dessert.

It wasn’t a bombastic day, but it was instead just what I wanted: quiet, filled with good food, and focused on time with my family. These are the celebrations I crave, these days.

I’m lucky that I get to spend all my days in a sort of celebration — filled with family and food and reflection — and not just my birthday. While life doesn’t feel quiet at all times (and how could it, with a five-year-old running around) and there always seems to be a surplus of things to do and not enough time in which to do it all, I’m blessed that I still have a life where I can focus on the things that are important to me and that I can celebrate the people and things I hold dear.

A few years ago, I read about a study that suggested ageing is not a slow and steady process, but instead posited that humans age dramatically in two bursts: at 44, then at 60.

I don’t know what my body is doing molecularly and if somehow everything shifted when I woke up that morning — though I have reason to believe my cardiovascular health issues hit me a year early, at 43 — but I do know that I’m starting to come to terms with my age more these days. My beard is greyer, my back is achier. I take longer to stand up when I’m seated on the floor. Running around after a kindergartener exhausts me. I am 44 years old, and if my body is having an ageing burst, I’m starting to feel it palpably.

Through it all, I’m finding reasons every day to celebrate: despite the aches and exhaustion, I am living a life of love and fulfillment that I could only dream of when I was younger. If, at 44, we’re supposed to start feeling our age, I’m feeling it with a sense of renewed delight knowing that I’ve spent all this time building a life that is just right for me.

I spent my birthday doing what I love, surrounded by people I love and who love me. I plan on doing that every single day of the rest of my life. This is one of the blessings that come with age: knowing what’s important and what means the most to you.

A poem

No Believer
W.S. Merwin

Still not believing in age I wake
to find myself older than I can understand
with most of my life in a fragment
that only I remember
some of the old colors are still there
but not the voices or what they are saying
how can it be old when it is now
with the sky taking itself for granted
there was no beginning I was there

Some links

At some point I will stop linking to things about Ruby Tandoh, but today is not that day. Recently, she wrote an excellent essay on Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French writer, gourmand and polymath who invented modern food writing, and in it, explored how food writing has shaped the way we eat and experience food.

Colin Gorrie has written a story in which each section is written in the style of English from 100 years prior — the first section was written in 2000s English, the next in 1900s, followed by 1800s, and so on — and the challenge is to see how far you can go before you stop understanding what’s going on in the story. An amazing exercise in understanding how language changes over time. (Once you give up, head to the end for an explanation of it all.)

Another gem from Mandy Brown, this time about how we’re all being designed to be specialists and how that manifests itself in the age of AI:

There's some use in distinguishing here between the worker who, having learned the skills of writing software over many years, now turns to so-called AI to assist her in that task; and the worker who will follow her some years hence and may never learn those skills, but will know only the work of supervision. The former, elder worker may find some interest or curiosity in applying her knowledge to this new technology, especially as the modes and methods for doing so are still being developed. But what of the worker who begins their work a decade from now, who has been specialized to do nothing more than ask for something? What will she know beyond that menial, dispiriting little task? What kind of people are we designing now?

The books coverage of the Washington Post has been eliminated, similar to cultural coverage and criticism of all kinds across media. What does it mean to have our culture mediated by the people who want to sell us things, rather than those that want us to think about things critically?

On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?

This essay on the return to office mandate at the federal government level has a lot of talk about things that aren’t as applicable to the many of you who aren’t in government (if you are a civil servant, it’s definitely worth a read), but it also contains this poignant observation:

When political pressure rises, the system seems to fall back on what it knows: attendance. People in seats managers can see working. Hybrid work fights boil down to a clash: rules from another era vs. individualized performance management. Without reform, this tension won't go away.

Location is easier to manage than results.

Here’s something I do every day: I take short notes on the things I learned in the podcasts that I listened to that day, and mark them down in my journal in the evening. In most cases, I forget the nuggets of wisdom a few days later, but the exercise of writing it down helps jog my memory when I do need to recall something. But I do wonder: if I’m listening to 7-8 podcasts a day, am I really learning anything? Or am I just engaging in phantom fluency, as Terry Godier calls it, because of the nature of the design of how we listen to podcasts in the first place. Terry’s piece is an excellent breakdown of how design choices have made podcast listening less of a learning experience and more of one of passive consumption.

From 2023, but still worth revisiting: what are the things we do today that will seem embarrassing or otherwise regrettable to our future selves — the stuff that will make us cringe when we look back on how we lived our lives in the early 2020s?

Something we all know but is worth repeating: routine medical procedures can feel harder for women, because many routine procedures were designed around male anatomy, and they don't always work the same way on female bodies.

Allow me a moment of extreme nerdiness: I LOVED Flickr’s URL schemes from back in the day. I was able to use the scheme to embed images in posts without having to click around and copy and paste; the schemes just made sense, and I haven’t seen anything like it on the web today. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was a fan of the Flickr URL scheme.

Dan Kois examines one of great traditions and how it is slowly dying: the use of bar soap in the shower. With body wash becoming pervasive, what is to become of the humble bar?

I’m incredibly excited for the new Robyn album, so this piece in The Cut where she answers questions from some of her biggest (celebrity) fans was absolutely delightful.